Many therapeutic agents, particularly those that are especially effective in cancer chemotherapy, often exhibit acute toxicity in vivo, especially bone marrow and mucosal toxicity, as well as chronic cardiac and neurological toxicity. Such high toxicity can limit their applications. Development of more and safer specific therapeutic agents, particularly antitumor agents, is desirable for greater effectiveness against tumor cells and a decrease in the number and severity of the side effects of these products (toxicity, destruction of non-tumor cells, etc.). Another difficulty with some existing therapeutic agents is their less than optimal stability in plasma. Addition of functional groups to stabilize these compounds resulted in a significant lowering of the activity. Accordingly, it is desirable to identify ways to stabilize compounds while maintaining acceptable therapeutic activity levels.
The search for more selective cytotoxic agents has been extremely active for many decades, the dose limiting toxicity (i.e., the undesirable activity of the cytotoxins on normal tissues) being one of the major causes of failures in cancer therapy. For example, CC-1065 and the duocarmycins are known to be extremely potent cytotoxins.
CC-1065 was first isolated from Streptomyces zelensis in 1981 by the Upjohn Company (Hanka et al., J. Antibiot. 31: 1211 (1978); Martin et al., J. Antibiot. 33: 902 (1980); Martin et al., J. Antibiot. 34: 1119 (1981)) and was found to have potent antitumor and antimicrobial activity both in vitro and in experimental animals (Li et al., Cancer Res. 42: 999 (1982)). CC-1065 binds to double-stranded B-DNA within the minor groove (Swenson et al., Cancer Res. 42: 2821 (1982)) with the sequence preference of 5′-d(A/GNTTA)-3′ and 5′-d(AAAAA)-3′ and alkylates the N3 position of the 3′-adenine by its CPI left-hand unit present in the molecule (Hurley et al., Science 226: 843 (1984)). Despite its potent and broad antitumor activity, CC-1065 cannot be used in humans because it causes delayed death in experimental animals.
Many analogues and derivatives of CC-1065 and the duocarmycins are known in the art. The research into the structure, synthesis and properties of many of the compounds has been reviewed. See, for example, Boger et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 35: 1438 (1996); and Boger et al., Chem. Rev. 97: 787 (1997).
A group at Kyowa Hakko Kogya Co., Ltd. has prepared a number of CC-1065 derivatives. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,101,038; 5,641,780; 5,187,186; 5,070,092; 5,703,080; 5,070,092; 5,641,780; 5,101,038; and 5,084,468; and published PCT application, WO 96/10405 and published European application 0 537 575 A1. None of the patents or applications disclose the strategy of enhancing the stability of the cytotoxins by forming cleaveable prodrugs.
The Upjohn Company (Pharmacia Upjohn) has also been active in preparing derivatives of CC-1065. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,739,350; 4,978,757, 5,332,837 and 4,912,227. The issued U.S. patents do not disclose or suggest that a prodrug strategy would be useful to improve the in vivo stability or reduce the toxicity of the compounds disclosed in the patents.
Research has also focused on the development of new therapeutic agents which are in the form of prodrugs, compounds that are capable of being converted to drugs (active therapeutic compounds) in vivo by certain chemical or enzymatic modifications of their structure. For purposes of reducing toxicity, this conversion is preferably confined to the site of action or target tissue rather than the circulatory system or non-target tissue. However, even prodrugs are problematic as many are characterized by a low stability in blood and serum, due to the presence of enzymes that degrade or activate the prodrugs before the prodrugs reach the desired sites within the patient's body.
Therefore, in spite of the advances in the art, there continues to be a need for the development of improved therapeutic agents for the treatment of mammals and humans in particular, more specifically cytotoxins that exhibit high specificity of action, reduced toxicity, and improved stability in blood relative to known compounds of similar structure. The instant invention addresses those needs.